Les Moore – Son of Stuck Funky

Love Duds

When last we left this examination of the life and times of Summer Moore, the retiring Betty Somethingorother was replaced as Westview High’s secretary by Cayla Williams. As we all know, Cayla will eventually be Les Moore’s second wife and Summer’s stepmother. She also happens to be the daughter of Smokey Williams, a pro baseball player who had appeared much earlier in Crankshaft being mentored by the crusty old bus driver. Cayla’s future position as Queen of the Taj Moore-hal will not be for a while, though Batty will get to kindling that fire in this, the year of love.

But love can take many forms of course such as the bonds between parent and child which will be somewhat tested this summer when our Messiah finds that her genetic contributor will be spending the time off from school making a nuisance of himself at her hangout spot.

In fact, Sporto Spice already has a backup plan by spending the summer playing youth softball which dear old dad sees as a potential gravy train.

*Not pictured is the fourth panel where Les’ eyes turn into dollar signs with a CHA-CHING sound effect.*

And it’s not just going to be Summer because Linda has noticed Jinx giving her father the typical teenager attitude because they’re just, you know, so opposite and all and decides to solve this problem by meddling. First by signing her daughter up for the same softball league behind her back.

While also signing up Bull to coach behind his back, christening it a bonding exercise for the two them and gloating about how her scheme is already working.

Now on the subject of love, Batty gives us this rather peculiar Sunday strip at the beginning of July.

*Tension isn’t the only thing building.*

This has nothing to do with anything, of course, but when I was collecting material for this piece I came across this and just had to grab it. This has to stand as one of the most bizarre strips in the comic’s history, right up there with Zanzibar, the Gun-Wielding Primate. Now I can clearly guess that Batty’s intention was just a simple “Pete gets pulled over and the cop’s amused by his wit and lets him off” kind of gag but I mean… he and Ayers had to know what they were doing right? The dialogue, the little knowing looks between them and the cop’s fierce way of walking away. A big Pride float filled with leather daddies going down Westview’s main street wouldn’t be near as homoerotic as this exchange between Mopey and Officer Sassy.

And now that I’ve given the yaoi fans the fuel that they’ve undoubtedly been craving, we go to the opposite end of the spectrum as Jinx is just thrilled, positively elated even, to be on the same team as Summer.

*TB was really on something this month.*

But ultimately this is more of a Jinx story where Summer is just along for the ride and it’s about her one shot of relevance in the strip’s entirety.

Meanwhile, while the girls play, the douche has been away having been sent off to New York by Funky to “take care of some things” at Montoni’s NYC location for him.

What that something is we never actually find out because instead Les’ entire trip is spent wandering around NYC talking to Cindy, bemoaning his so-far-failed writing career or reminiscing about his and Lisa’s honeymoon… anything except doing his goddamned job which will be a startlingly common thing with him going forward. It’s during this trip that we also learn that love never dies, it just remains trapped in a depressing purgatory that leaves you looking like an utter lunatic to everyone around you.

That’s right, everyone’s favorite wraith has made her entry into the comic ready to show up at only the most inopportune and awkward times.

Les returns home to news of The Coming Reunion and decides to spend all day moping about getting old and telling his bemused daughter that the ravages of time shall be visiting her too.

By this point Summer has turned 16 and her hospital is throwing a party for all the NICU kids like her who are also turning 16 this year.

And not content to haunting this earthly realm in spectral form, Lisa has left Summer a little birthday present. We get the first of Lisa’s video messages so she can lecture, chastize and threaten the world of the living from beyond the grave. She takes advantage of this inspired bit of forethought to tell Summer the harrowing story of how her half-brother was almost named Econoline.

*“Now, my lovely daughter, I want you to find my diary so you can have all the filthy details. This, your mother commands!”*

By the way, Lisa sounds like Doris Grau in my head whenever these cancer video strips pop up.

In September a new player enters the scene when Susan Smith returns as a full time teacher at Westview, crossing paths with what will be one of the other parts of the most nonsensical love triangle imaginable.

In October it’s time for another Lisa’s Legacy run with everyone oohing and aahing over Summer for how she’s helped organize the event. She’s also shown hanging out with Cory who’s been forced to come by his parents.

Unfortunately all the money raised this year has been stolen but Funky graciously offers to have Montoni’s cover the amount which Summer has to accept on behalf of her dithering dad.

Of course we immediately find out that Cory stole the money, Holly and Funky know and Funky declares it the “last time I cover for you.” As should be expected though, the shock of Cory being the thief is what’s most important so this is never again followed up on. Cory stole thousands of dollars and basically got away with it. Great writing, Batty!

And speaking of the complete opposite of great writing, soon after Les is moping around because yet another of his crappy stories has been rejected.

*How could they reject “Majors League: The Unauthorized Biography of Mike Majors”?*

In despair Les tells Summer to file it away with all the other garbage. But our curious as a cat savior spies something.

After a quick perusal of it she tells her father to use it instead.

And thus is born Lisa’s Story, the third part of the unholy trinity that will allow Lisa to forever haunt this series for the rest of its life.

With school back up in full swing and Summer now on the varsity squad, life decides to throw her a few curveballs. First up is the loss of the team’s coach who like St. Lisa before her decided to leave Westview for Seattle. Forced to take her place, and still fretting over coaching girls, is newly minted athletic director Bull Bushka.

And he’s not the only new arrival because also transferring is Big Walnut Tech’s star player, Keisha Williams.

Summer is naturally none too happy that she now has competition for the spot of being the team’s star player.

I will give Batty some credit in actually giving Summer a somewhat negative character trait but not overplaying it too much. One would expect someone with the competitive drive to be a star athlete to also have a bit of arrogance to them and not really take kindly to threats to their status. Of course it’s not overplayed for the reason that almost all of his stories ultimately go nowhere but hey, it’s something.

Les decides to take the opportunity to tease Summer about her feeling threatened.

And in a Sunday strip we get Summer tagging along for the incredibly rare Maddie-centric comic as she buys a hat that’s just like her father’s.

*Thankfully TB didn’t also have her decide to start living in her locker.*

Les and Cayla both show up to basketball practice and Cayla decides for some ungodly reason to begin flirting with Les while also revealing that she’s Ketamine’s mother.

At this same time Summer gets picked to be part of the court at the Winterfest dance but is bemoaning not having a date. We also learn that she has apparently been dating — and broken up with — a mysterious “Ron” the whole time so I amend my statement a bit from the previous entry. Now if you thought that showing Summer with a boyfriend, you know the kind of thing that would good both for her and for doing stories about a father dealing with his kid growing up, would be important… well you’re not Tom Batiuk. Maybe Ron just went to a different school in Canada so we couldn’t see him, who knows?

A big school dance would also require a new dress which leads to another Ghost Lisa appearance in what is a favorite strip of readers of this site wherein Les basically yells at his daughter to stop dressing like a tramp.

Cayla, like Les, has signed up to chaperone the dance and makes very subtle come ons to him.

Summer continues to curse the cruel whims of her Flash-obsessed creator. She’s the dateless loser while her dad is going on a date with her rival’s mother? It’s utterly preposterous! Les, of course, plays the role of dense harem manga protagonist to a T just to make him even more annoying.

But lo, the tables turn because Cory has been “volunteered” to ask Summer to the dance.

Cory, despite his protestations to the contrary, doesn’t seem particularly thrilled. I assume going on a date with the school’s popular star athlete was his “punishment” for stealing thousands of dollars from a charity event and maybe he realizes what a farce this whole story and indeed series is.

I don’t know if Batty had any intention of actually doing some kind of a romance between Summer and Cory but if he did then he rightly realized that actually putting Les and Funky’s kids together would have been too lame and cliche a move even for him because this is immediately dropped. One thing he didn’t drop of course is the one between Les and Cayla.

As we can see, TB seemed to be in a bit of a lovin’ mood in the back half of the year. 2008 was the year where he’d had his car crash so maybe that close call led him to a bit of reevaluating that he decided to temporarily reflect in Funky. Whatever the case most of it will end up going nowhere: Summer’s love life, Pete’s flirty little brush with the law, not a one of them.

Summer at least is actually getting a reasonable amount of focus now compared to most of the first year or so of Act III but of course you can still see issues. Batty’s love of doing something shocking only for it to go nowhere is evident in Cory’s stealing of the Lisa’s Legacy money; as I said maybe the date for the Winterfest is the “punishment” but if so then that’s a pretty poor cap to that. Les takes a job at Montoni’s which mostly seems to exist as a reason for him to go to New York so he can mope about his failed writing career and see Lisa’s ghost.

But at least his writing career up to this point can be described as “failed.” Not so for Mopey who, if you remember, is reintroduced in Act III as a successful writer for Marvel. Not brought up here is that he’s now, somehow, moved over to DC to write Superman which leads a multiweek storyline about Pete feeling inadequate and going to Jerry Siegel’s childhood home where he imagines what Siegel (or Pete playing the role of Siegel) must have felt when creating Superman in what is the first of the Pete (and later Darin) flashback to the olden days of comics strips.

Les, of course, is a self-insert for Batty but Pete feels like an even more blatant one at times.

But that’s getting off track and is also enough ranting for one day so I’ll leave things here for now. Batty’s plots may be going nowhere and neither is this retrospective as brother, we still have a long way to go.

Surprise! You’re On Cancer Camera!

Part 1

Part 2

Outside the circumstances of her birth, life has been pretty simple for Summer. I mean true, she is a toddler so it can’t really be all that complicated for her but still, things have been going pretty well for the Moores and the residents of Westview in general minus the occasional hiccup. Sure, John got his hopes up that maybe the pretty one-armed pizza lady was going to give him the time of day only to have them cruelly dashed when that bastard Wally returned.

But Tom Batiuk is an artiste with a vision and soon the misery miasma will blanket Westview once more for he shall unleash upon it’s hatchet-faced denizens his masterpiece.

However at the start of 2005, things are going so good that after only their second date — which followed her being ghosted for most of the previous year — Funky and Holly get engaged! Wally and Lefty are as well so it’s going to be a double wedding at Montoni’s. This wedding stuff will take up well over half of the year and so for a lot of it Summer will only be making some token appearances. In fact it won’t be until February when Summer makes her first appearance of the year, starting to talk and being used to prank her Lego-headed father.

But February is also when we start getting the first hints that things will be taking a decidedly darker turn as Wally begins trying to deal with his PTSD and Roberta Blackburn appears out of nowhere to pester her daughter and son-in-law to be. But she’s also there looking for a gift for Becky’s cousin who just so happens to like comic books so Becky directs her moralizing mother down to Komix Korner where some Japanese works catch her attention and soon, the cops are taking John to the slammer. Presumably for having shit taste in manga.

*“Sir, we’re taking you in on one count of actually liking Rent-A-Girlfriend.”*

So Lisa’s got her big plot for the year, trying to uphold the sanctity of artistic expression and fight obscenity laws and you know… I really in a broad sense do agree with Batty on these types of issues whenever they do come up. After all, I live in the state that produced Jack Thompson and a lot of my formative and not-so-formative years involved hearing about his antics against music, video games and the like. But Batty makes it so damn hard when his arguments for them is delivered in a manner that tends to be overly self-assured in spite of their shallow insipidness. Like Les will go “These articles are important because free speech!” which… yeah? No shit. Or Lisa will stand in front of a jury and go “Comics… are art!” and yeah, of course they are.

But come on, Batty! This is an issue you seem passionate about so whenever you bring it up maybe show a little more fire than “[thing] is good, actually” and then leaving it at that.

With all of these events going on, it’s months before we see Summer again as she shows up during the Winkerbean double wedding in June.

Which then causes her to have marriage on the brain.

*In the end, I don’t think he’ll have to worry about that.*

But once again there’s no time in summer for Summer because it’s taken up by Wally and Becky’s honeymoon to beautiful Afghanistan. Which includes this rather bizarre strip just before Wally leaves.

In a case of Batty just grabbing characters from other works, the implication is that La Choi San — the outdated cariature who doubles as the grandmother of Jade Dragon owner Liu Lin — is actually the Dragon Lady from Terry and the Pirates and is giving Terry’s flight jacket to Wally. It’s a jacket that Wally will wear all throughout the Afghanistan story that takes up a full two months of the strip’s focus, ending with he and Becky deciding to adopt Rana, the younger sister of the girl who rescued Wally during his original MIA phase but who was blown up along with the rest of her family by a car bomb.

Naturally, Lisa adds “adoption” to her plate of legal work to help them bring Rana over to the U.S. just as Becky’s taken the assistant band director job at the high school that was vacated when Kara became Big Walnut Tech’s band director.

Summer is still kind of there, hanging around during a multi-week story about Taj Moore-hal having bats in the attic… Batiuks, if you will hyuck hyuck.

John’s trial occurs and Lisa has her big success with the rousing argument that John can’t be guilty of breaking obscenity laws because comics are art and also the “child” that was in the store when Roberta purchased the pornography — part of the reason John was being charged with breaking obscenity laws — was really an adult midget. It sort of feels like TB wasted months’ worth of time just to get to that punchline too.

The year winds down with some ligther fare like a pun worse than my bats in the attic one.

*Also, web blog? Where do you think the word “blog” comes from Batty?*

And some Christmas shenanigans.

But poor Summer opens up the next year having caught some kind of bug leading to a week of Les having to care for his sick child.

After heroically puking all over her father, she again takes a backseat to Lisa and Holly’s cancer support group as well as Becky learning she’s pregnant. We do get what I believe is the first appearance together of Summer and Cory though.

But it’s the calm before the storm. Things look as if they’re going well and Les is even going to have his story published in the New Yorker which means Summer, and we, get to watch him do a dumb little dance.

But as Lisa’s expression in the last panel indicates, something is wrong. She’d gone in to participate in some genetic testing but something came up and she gets the confirmation just as her and Les are heading out on a vacation to New York.

That’s right folks, it’s been twenty years since The Story That Changed Everything and with his creative fires fueled, Tom Batiuk has decided to give us The Story That Changed Everything II: The Lady with All the Cancers. Les and Lisa go on their vacation but of course the shadow of cancer looms over everything. When they get back, Lisa makes sure to give her daughter a hug and give the audience one of Funky Winkerbean‘s patented cursed close ups.

I would assume that deciding to bring back Lisa’s cancer is when Batty decided to do a second timeskip and it seems to have really put him in a mood because this is when we’re getting all the stuff that seemed to catch the attention of the broader internet in the mid-2000s, making people fascinated by how damn miserable this strip was. Because this is also the same timeframe where Wally gets dragged away from his family and back into active duty in Iraq which, spoilers, will not work out well for him. At all. This is right after construction on the street in front of Montoni’s forced the Jade Dragon to close as well.

But it’s not all bad, at least in-universe, because this is also the period where Darin and Jessica Darling, Whose Father John Darling Was Murdered, become an item when she’s impressed by some quick thinking he pulled to unforunately save Pete from getting his ass kicked by the Rough Riders from Crankshaft. And this is when Bull Bushka gets married to walking buzzkill Linda Lopez, who’d hooked up during summer break the previous year. It’s the kind of story you think we’d actually see but no, because Batty loves his shocking twists and so figured it was best to have everything happen offscreen so he could randomly spring it on the readers.

Why let a story get in the way of a good surprise?

A lot of the rest of 2006 goes back and forth between Lisa’s cancer — which includes repeated appearances by the worst doctor on Earth and a trip to the Grand Canyon — and the stuff with Darin and Jessica. Interspersed is also a goofy story about Montoni’s being profiled by the Food Network which culminates in some kind of Iron Chef style pizza cooking competition show.

Summer’s last significant appearance of 2006 and her first one since showing up in the background before Les and Lisa leave for Arizona isn’t until December.

Batty was too busy with other things to deal with Summer. There’s Becky giving birth, John continuing to pine for her and setting up things that will have zero payoff by establishing Mooch’s relationship with Mindy Murdoch and Crazy Harry’s second kid, both of which will disappear shortly into Act III.

But 2007 starts off with a seeming bright spot for Lisa.

Joy of joys, Lisa’s results are looking good and she’s in remission which seems to be putting her in a much better mood as she can actually appreciate having a kid again. The one she actually has mind you, not the one she gave up and pines for.

Unfortunately for Lisa we’re in the misery porn era of Funky Winkerbean so it’s not long before she learns that her doctor has in fact been utterly incompetent and that they’d mixed up her results with someone else’s.

Now given all of this — that Lisa had gone off her chemo and other treatments for a few months because of their screw up, the fact that said screw up even happened at all — you’d expect the Moores to do something right? I would guess that they probably have a pretty clear case for a malpractice lawsuit. But nope, they just throw up their hands and say nothing can be done. There’s a constant thing whenever Lisa is brought up about what a strong fighter she was right up until the end but no, not really. She immediately gives up and just allows herself to rot away over the next few months.

Because as we all know, Lisa is destined to die and it’s in the summer when she gets the news, delivered to her by Dr. Screwup in the most tactful and courteous manner she can muster.

Now let me digress a bit here to ask, what was Batty’s intention with this character? Was it to portray someone who was ultimately a good and caring doctor who made a little whoopsie doodle because we all make mistakes? Or was she intended to be representative of the real or perceived cold indifference of the American healthcare system? I suspect something closer to the first one given that neither Les nor Lisa treat her with the scorn she rightly deserves for messing up in such a massive way.

And that response? “Months… but don’t ask me how many.” Double fuck Dr. Dipshit. It’s easy to want to criticize various characters for various reasons in Batiuk’s works but I don’t really think any of them are as bad as Dr. Hallet. It’s not just the incompetence but the callous flippancy with which she tells Lisa that she’s going die that makes her so unbelievably repugnant in a setting filled with repugnant jackasses. Les at Bull’s funeral comes close but really, she might be the absolute worst person in the history of the strip.

While this has been going on, the other major story running through the year has been Darin, at Jessica’s urging, searching for his birth mother. There were some starts and stops but eventually the information is released and he learns that Lisa is his bio-mom and decides to convey this via creepily watching Lisa and Summer play in front of Taj Moore-hal.

Maybe someone can tell me whether I’m right or not but I get this feeling that this is a go-to Batty likes to employ as part of his forced dramatics. The whole shot of someone staring at others from their car. I don’t think this is either the first or last time this type of thing occurs but maybe I’m wrong.

From here Darin basically plays real big brother to Summer who now has to face her dying mother though of course is still to young to fully grasp what’s happening.

Shortly after this she enters kindergarten as well.

Lisa’s state is rapidly deteriorating and by September she’s hit the point where she can’t go up and down the stairs and so effectively enters hospice care in the living room.

Batty decides to get in one last minute instance of both closing off a plot thread and setting things up for Act III by having Bull and Linda pop by with the kid they’ve spent most of the year trying to adopt. At that point it’s pretty much the endgame for Lisa. Her parents show up one final time so her dad can apologize for not being there for her even though they’ve been around plenty the last few years.

Finally Masky McDeath appears to usher Lisa into the Great Phantom Zone Beyond and it’s over.

And we immediately smash cut to a goateed Les lying on a couch, speaking to a therapist as it flashes back to him dropping off Summer with the Winkerbeans while he heads to New York to spread Lisa’s ashes in Central Park.

Now Batty’s rationale for fast forwarding through and past everything was that he didn’t want to turn the comic into an extended grieving process but given what happens in Act III that’s obviously a load of crap.

The simple fact is that he wants to tell this grand ongoing narrative but is incapable of thinking of stories as existing beyond themselves. When the Flash beat Weather Wizard that was the end of it, it didn’t affect the next issue and it’s the same approach that Batty likes to take with his stories. Which is fine if you want to do a bunch of loosely connected but self-contained stories but that isn’t what he’s doing. We can see that in the currently ongoing Dinkle Pity Party in Crankshaft where 50+ years of Harry L. Dinkle, the World’s Greatest Band Director is brushed aside as a mere persona created by a man with daddy issues. All the haranguing, egotism, band turkeys… it was just an act to hide Dinkle’s insecurities. None of it was mentioned before this story and I would bet that once it’s over it’ll go in the same box and shoved into the same closet as all the other important stories and revelations like Danny Madison or Bull’s having protected Les from even worse bullying.

Or like Lisa’s death and the fallout from it. A story this big needs to dive into what happens afterwards, how the characters react, how Lisa’s passing affects them. But Batty is incapable of thinking about any of that and to him it’s not important anyway. Lisa dying was what was important and once her life ended so to did the story and it was time to move on to the next one. So the two weeks that TB allots for the story of Les’ NYC sojourn is all we get. This was his big masterpiece of a story and it’s treated with all the gravitas of the ending of a Silver Age comic book as that’s what his storytelling sensibilities are stuck in.

And back to the actual story, we get a little bit with Les returning to tuck Summer into bed and stare forlornly at his now empty bed.

*Don’t worry, Lisa will quite literally be there with you in spirit.*

And, uh, sniff Lisa’s clothes like a giant creepy weirdo.

He finally sits Summer down to explain death to her and that Mommy isn’t coming home at which point we get one final Sunday that transitions to older versions of Les and Summer.

With that, Act II officially closes and we enter into Act III starring the middle-aged Les and the teenage Summer… for now, anyway. We’ve jumped ahead ten years but not really as infamously the timeline was instead shifted back by a decade because I guess TB is so lacking in imagination that he was unable to think of what life would look like in the far off year of 2017. Perhaps it would have had flying cars and ray guns and look like something out of an atomic age sci-fi comic book but maybe not. Best not to risk being wrong.

What will the future of Funky Winkerbean and Summer Moore look like from here? Next time we’ll gaze into tomorrow to look at the future-present of Westview and Batty’s attempts at making Summer into an actual character.

The Littlest Accessory

I will be honest, once I finished the first part of this Summer retrospective I figured I would just take things up through the end or close to the end of Act II. See, it’s kind of hard to talk about Summer in Act II because she’s really not much of a character given that she only just starts kindergarten in the final few months of it. For most of it she’s just a baby or a pre-schooler and really doesn’t seem to exist as an actual character as much as she is a kind of thing that’s drawn into scenes with Les and/or Lisa.

She’s more of a living, baby-shaped accessory than anything else. She’s not a baby who’s secretly an evil genius or anything, she’s just kind of there to add color to scenes. There’s a part of me that wanted to just get through this period as fast as possible because of it but I just couldn’t do it. For one thing, I realized doing that would make this a mega-sized entry and we don’t really need one that’s as long as this insipid Larry Dinkle storyline over in Crankshaft. But I also realized that maybe there’s at least a little value in using Summer’s presence to give us a sort of quickish overview on the last few years of Act II.

By the by, Batty’s inability to keep to a timeline rears its ugly head once more due to a teeny tiny problem. That problem is, once again, the presence of Durwood and the rest of his high school class. Summer is born in summer 2002 and at the end of summer/start of fall in 2007 she’s entering kindergarten which would mean five years in-universe have passed. I’m sure the readers can already see the issue but just to make sure it’s clear to everyone, when Lisa said she was wanting to get pregnant she mentioned that Darin was a junior in high school. Even if we give that Batty doesn’t actually know high school grade names and Darin is actually a freshman, he still should have been out of high school by around 2005. Yet Summer’s entering kindergarten and Darin’s class graduating happens at the same time. So is the Class of ’07 just exceptionally slow? How did it take them six years to finish four grades in high school?

Ah well, there’s no use getting myself worked up over it. Let’s get to what this is actually about. Batty decides to open up the year with some biting humor about how guys like football and some times they get loud while watching it.

Les also shows that now that the new car smell is gone he cares about his daughter roughly as much as he cares about everything that’s not his precious writing.

*Haha, it’s funny because she’s suffocating!*

Now it’s around the period of John Byrne’s stint as artist and all the attempted dramatics of DCH John’s attempts at wooing Becky and getting tossed to the curb because Wally has shown back up in Westview, having survived being blown up in Afghanistan. Inbetween weeks where John’s mother sits forlornly with a Superman cake and John purchasing an engagement ring so he can ask Becky to marry him after like one or two dates, we get a week dedicated to Lesisa deciding to ignore Summer while she cries in the hopes of getting her used to sleeping normally.

With this hurdle cleared, Summer seems to be taking to other major infant milestones quickly such as hitting the point where she begins doing a Michigan J. Frog impression.

This is also the time period where Lisa was starting out as a lawyer with her first job being helping out at a women’s legal center to help deal with a guy who was going after an employee for having breast cancer. That job lasted for as long as Batty needed to do his “Lisa fights for cancer victims” story because the minute the case is over the legal center shuts down forcing Lisa to get a new job. A word is put in for her to work as a public defender in the state’s capital appeals division where she meets yet another sexist jerk when she’s forced to bring Summer along with her to her first day on the job.

She gets assigned to working on a case involving a death row inmate named Danny Madison, a Vietnam veteran who’s up for execution for a robbery and murder. Working with Misogynist Man — real name Mark Potter — we get the impression that he’s less a misogynist and more just an incredibly jaded guy due to the high failure rate of his line of work. I mean if your job was fighting losing battles to keep people from dying you’d probably have a case of the Mondays too, so his introduction kind of sticks out since these sexist tendencies never really crop up again.

For most of the rest of 2003, then, Lisa is busy trying to find any evidence to exonerate Danny. From statements about his PTSD from convenient war buddy and Westview High vice principal Nate Green, to shaky justification for unreliable witness testimony because one of the witnesses to the murder was a shut-in which I guess means her eyes didn’t function or something. So while this is going on, it’s up to Les to play Mr. Mom and take Summer on a playdate where he reacts to lady talk about the way you’d expect him too.

But he manages to overcome his fear of cooties and win the Mom Squad over with pretzels, beer and football proving that old canards about what planets men and women come from wrong (Les, for the record, comes from Hisanus). While Les is wooing the Westview MILF Brigade though, things aren’t going so well for Lisa. Her clever legal tactic of throwing agoraphobes under the bus fails to have much of an effect and it’s looking more and more like Danny’s not going to make it leading to this heartwarming Thanksgiving strip.

As time continues to run short for Danny, Les attempts to introduce Summer to sports.

April finds out that Kortney’s been using sex chatrooms while she’s supposed to be working but Ellie can’t bring herself to fire her, while Liz has started student teaching– wait, that strip’s got me all mixed up.

Anyway, all of Lisa’s efforts have failed which means Danny’s execution is imminent. This leads to the delightful Christmas tale of Lisa having to go to the prison and watch — at his request no less — Danny being executed. Misogynist Mark had told Lisa when she started that he thought she didn’t have the spine enough to stick with the job and after having earned his respect, Lisa decides to prove him right by immediately quitting.

Danny had learned of Summer when talking to Lisa a little before Thanksgiving and when Lisa had come in to tell him that they were out of options, he in turn tells her that he’d made Summer a Christmas present. After his execution we see that it’s a snowman carved out of what I presume is prison soap.

*I suppose it’s better than a shank or prison hooch.* Or a toy made out of the gun that killed your grandfather.

I get that Batty was trying to give a touching end to an otherwise grim story but man, that second panel there is just kind of weird and the emotion doesn’t come through at all. Maybe it needed Ghost Danny or something, I don’t know. But Danny’s more or less forgotten as soon as he’s gone and to start 2004 we see that Les’ inadvertant indoctrination is beginning to take hold and Summer is on the path to becoming a filthy sporto.

Batty also can’t help himself by bringing back one of his favorite tropes: dramatic irony.

*See, it’s funny because they are brother and sister!*

At this point, presaging her eventual future in Act III, Batty’s started getting bored of the little rugrat and so her appearances actually dwindle a lot. She gets some things like a customary appearance during Mother’s Day but she’s mostly just there to hang around as a prop for scenes. This includes a week in August about her birthday party — the prepartion and the actual party — where I’m pretty sure that Summer doesn’t actually appear because he’s more worried about sticking it to helicopter parents for some reason.

One of the big storylines running throughout 2004 is the Moores deciding that being well into adulthood with careers and a kid, they should start looking for a house. More precisely, Lisa decides this while Les pouts and grumbles the whole time. All of their initial attempts, including a crossover week with Crankshaft where they were checking out Lilian’s house, go nowhere. And then in the fall, they find it; the place of their dreams. A cozy little home in a cozy little neighborhood.

*I’m not passing up opportunities to see Les get hurt.*

The Taj Moore-hal has arrived and it hates Les because there’s a running joke for a while of him hitting his head on a low-hanging pipe every time he goes into the basement.

Of course come December, we also get the customary dose of Lisa pining for the son she had to give up while the daughter she actually has sits in blissful, childish ignorance of being Mommy’s Little Runner-Up.

I’ll end things here for now with the close of 2004. There’s some other events that take place this year too such as the start of Funky’s relationship with Holly, which means the first appearances of Cory Winkerbean, as well as the birth of Maddie Klinghorn in the summer. That last one is another thing that throws the sacred timeline off because she’s a full year younger than Summer yet is in the same grade when realistically she shouldn’t be. If TimeMop can’t even keep the timestream clean, I can’t imagine what a poor job he does with the floors and bathrooms.

As I said earlier, it’s a bit hard to write about Summer specifically in Act II because she’s just a toddling prop more than she is an actual character. So I think that next time, for real, I’ll try and get through the rest of Act II and all the fun times with cancer that made this strip famous.

Making a Messiah

Over in Crankshaft, Batty is taking a trip into the distant past of the Funkyverse as three old farts stand around in a storage unit while one of them regales his enraptured pals and unenraptured readers about how his daddy played the trumpet and wore a suit. Larry Dinkle went all around the Great Lakes region but was never around the one place where — *sniff* — it mattered most.

But while Batty is looking back to reveal the Funkyverse’s past, we shall be looking back in order to reveal its future. So nestle in, dear reader, for this tale truly told…

It is late 2022 and Tom Batiuk has just dropped his bombshell via crotchety Golden Age relic Ruby Lith that it’s over. After fifty long years Funky Winkerbean would be coming to an end in but a few short weeks. A half-century of characters mugging at the fourth wall, life or death school levy votes, old men geeking out over even older comic books, Les Moore’s undeservedly smug face, cancer, alcoholism, band candy and murderous gun-wielding chimpanzees would finally draw to a close.

However there were still things to learn about Westview, OH and it was the job of one person to learn them. They had to, after all, for as it turns out only they alone could do this. Only they had the ability to sift through the information and see the patterns and find the clues that would allow us to become a better, more united people. And someone else was there to make sure that they did it.

Summer Moore had a destiny. She would write the book that would bring about utopia. The book that would help us realize that humanity was our nation. The greatest work of philosophy by the greatest one book author of all time. But how would she get to this point? What could have caused an otherwise innocuous young woman from a middling Rust Belt town to eventually become the Pattern-Finder?

In order to answer these oh-so-pressing questions, I’ll be starting a new series examining the twists and turns of Summer’s life. Because surely this will be a sensible and logical development and not just Tom Batiuk pulling something out of his ass at the last minute, won’t it?

But while the cat’s in the cradle over in Crankshaft, we’ll be starting with a different cradle entirely as examining Summer’s life means that we must first examine her pre-life which means going all the way back into the wilds of 2001. It was a year of great tragedy as Funky started it drukenly passed out on the sidewalk, his marriage rapidly crumbling around him. In these dark times though there was a bright spot as Lisa, cancer free and better than you, was working on her law degree and decided to let slip that there was something else she wanted.

The Moores decide to talk about Lisa’s sudden desire for a child with Les expressing his worries in his usual whiny and self-absorbed manner.

Being the insufferable turd that he is, Les decides to take this time to bust out his new character that he’s been working on — Armchair Freud — and begin psychoanalyizing his wife’s desire to have a child.

Of course Lisa did not decide on a whim that she wanted a baby. As we all know, Batty loves his meaningful anniversaries and in November 2001 it had been 15 years since the story that forever changed the trajectory of Funky Winkerbean and Tom Batiuk’s career. And what better way to call back to it than to get Lisa’s biological clock a-tickin’ and have her come down with a case of baby fever? For the next month then, the reader is treated to a complete retelling of the Pregnant Lisa Saga from 1986 and I suppose it’s a minor miracle that Batty got Ayers to actually draw the whole thing as opposed to taking the exceedingly lazy way out and just reprinting it.

Tangenting here, and there may be more tangents as this series goes, but we see here some of Batty’s patented ability to completely disregard his own timeline. Lisa states that “Dopey” Darin Fairgood is a junior in high school which would mean, given that this is set around the time of his birthday, he’s just about to turn 17 years old. You’d think that wanting to call back to his most important story, Batty would just say “he’s a freshman in high school” to line up with the story’s anniversary.

Yet for some reason Batty is basically acting as if the last few years have been happening in real time even though time in this strip has always been a fluid thing — For Better or For Worse this ain’t. I mean it won’t be until 2007 when Darin’s generation, having entered high school in 1998, graduates. So for Darin to be a junior in 2001, his birth would have had to happen in 1984 which I guess lines up with when he started school but would then mean that, if we kept the original 1988 graduation date that Act II establishes, then Lisa would have been a freshman herself when she was pregnant which okay, fine. But in 2002, for the strip’s 30th anniversary, Funky will also celebrate his 30th birthday. With the Act I crew graduating college at 22, that would mean that Act II would have had to have started in 1994 and Funky’s group graduated in 1990 not 1988 which means Lisa would have had to have given birth, at the earliest, in 1986 which means Darin should be a freshman and not a junior which means…

God dammit, why do I put more thought into this than him?

Okay, back to the actual important stuff. After the flashback to Lisa’s nebulously dated pregnancy, she’s feeling frisky and decides it’s time to get to babymakin’ with the most sensual of come ons.

Wooed by those romantic words, in February 2002 we learn that Les was successful at implanting his miracle seed within his ovulating she-bride and that she now carries Ohio’s most divine child inside her cancer womb.

With the divine child now growing within her, life continues as normal for Lisa and Les over the next few months. Les does… uh, something — Les-type things I suppose — while Lisa graduates law school. At the same time both Funky and Crazy Harry are going through their own significant life changes as Funky’s in the process of getting divorced while Crazy has gotten engaged to Donna who, you’ll be surprised to learn, was actually the Eliminator the whole time! Betcha didn’t expect that, did you? Because of all these changes going on in their lives, the guys decide to go on a camping trip as this may be their last chance to do so, while at the same time Lisa is in Columbus taking the bar exam.

Everything’s going pretty well which of course means it’s time for drama to rear it’s head. Which it does when Lisa arrives back at Montoni’s and to her surprise ends up in a confrontation with an old friend.

*Leapin’ lizards! What a shocking development!*

Yes, while carrying the holy child within her Lisa is met with the appearance of Ohio Satan who, while not all powerful in his devilry, is able to draw upon his hellish powers to engage in minor annoyance. This annoyance comes in the form of Frankie demanding Lisa take him to his son — who ironically is right there unbeknownst to any of them — and he won’t take no for an answer. Because he’s evil, you see. So evil that he manhandles Lisa a little bit with dire consequences.

The stress of the situation causes Lisa to go into labor… I guess? I would assume that’s the reason anyway but who can really know? Godtiuk works in mysterious ways after all. Frankie takes the opportunity to skedaddle on out of the comic for the time being. With Darin and Lisa being the only two in Montoni’s it’s suggested that an ambulance is called but like a true Batiukian Hero, Darin decides he can get her to the hospital faster than the crummy professionals whose jobs it is to do this and who are basically their own traffic laws.

*How are EMTs even going to compete with a pizza delivery car?*

I mean how else was TomBa going to give us some hilarious dramatic irony and Teen Pregnant Lisa callbacks if the characters just left things up to the professionals like reasonable people? Don’t they know that there’s awards to be won? And oh man was Tommy Boy really in love with the dramatic irony for this story because he was practically ODing on it.

*It’s funny of course because he’s just reenacting his own birth.*

Okay, what the hell? Darin was canonically born in 1986 so he, if this took place in real time, cannot possibly be in the 11th grade. Unless I’m discounting the possibility that TB doesn’t actually know the difference between freshman, sophomore, junior and senior which maybe I shouldn’t be.

Anyway, the whole situation means that that the Annointed One was born a little earlier than normal and so she’s put on a ventilator to help her survive.

While talking with the doctor, the Moores realize that with all the craziness going on this summer they forgot to decide on a name for their little girl. Lisa decides that craziness means that Summer is the name that they’ll be going with which means I can finally start calling her by her actual name too. With the newborn Summer now clinging to life in Doctor Depresso’s Breatheinator 5000, Lisa fills in Les — who’d zipped back from the camping trip because he somehow felt that “something was wrong back home” — on the events that led to their kid’s premature birth. Les comically threatens to kick Frankie’s ass if he ever shows up again.

While you’re thinking of people more qualified and able than Les to beat up Frankie — the newborn Summer for instance — our hero decides to start making a list.

Batty, of course, is milking the apparent touch and go nature of Summer’s situation for everything it’s worth.

But fret not for this is but a fake out and these are happy tears! It turns out that Summer has gained a pound and Les is overcome with joy, huzzah! Things are going well and Summer’s about ready to leave the hospital, so Les goes out to buy a fancy new digital camera so he can get Boy Genius to explain to him and Lisa how uploading a picture works.

By the way, giving me vibes similar to this gem.

But even back in 2002 uploading pictures of your kids onto the internet for the whole world to see could lead to some suspicious characters coming across them. Characters you might not want.

*I bet he also evilly narrates putting jelly on his English muffin.*

Who could this be? Frankie? Or someone even more sinister?

Why it’s just another fake out as Lisa’s dad and/or mom were sinisterly and dramatically narrating their every action for our benefit simply to fool us. Perhaps they’re aware they’re characters in a comic strip and understand dramatic tension. Who can say? Regardless of any potential medium awareness, they’ve decided to move back to Westview to be closer to their family and so Lisa can have a convenient babysitter. Summer soon after has her first Christmas and Les decides to end it with the type of uplifting positivity that only he can provide.

*The world’s crummy and maybe it’ll be slightly less crummy for you but still crummy. Merry Christmas, kid.*

With that I’ll close things off here for the time being. The future Messiah has been born and all is right with the world for now. There will be plenty of time for Batty to screw up his handling of this most important of all Westviewians later but next time we may possibly rocket through a good chunk of the remaining years of Act II. Or we may not. But there will be a next time because we’ve got a long way to go.

Sadie Sinks

Last time in this little retrospective on the life and times of Sadie Summers, we charted her journey as the strip entered the mid-1990s, exiting the wilds of early Act II as the comic that surrounded her would begin to settle into its more familiar form. By this point the holdover gags from Act I had begun to fade away as more dramatic storylines took their place. The period covered by part 3 saw the establishment of the poetry club’s literary magazine which would lead to a long storyline involving a suicide attempt by Susan Smith and, more broadly, a madcap trip across Europe for Les Moore tha would end in his proposing to Lisa.

Sadie was… involved in this but only just barely. A lot of her time during that period was spent either around the mall with her interchangeable friends or doing poetry club stuff with Susan but for the most part she never got deeply involved with the serious stories. It was that relationship with Susan which would be the most significant as 1995 had ended with Sadie being the one to welcome her back to Westview High in an attempt to dispel the awkwardness that Susan had received. After all, one can assume that the logic is that if the most popular girl in school is showing her support then everyone will have to follow suit. It’s an interesting and welcome bit of character development for Sadie. But sadly, like a lot of things with her it turns out to be a very stop-start sort of deal.

Much like most of the other years during the early portions of Act II, Sadie gets an early appearance in 1996 spotting Les at the mall.

She also complains about proficiency exams.

And has a sleepover.

*At least my birthday strip wasn’t a Les or Dinkle one.*

You’ll notice that there’s not really much going on in these and it’s very frustrating considering how 1995 ended. At least Sadie’s making some appearances though because I believe Susan basically disappears for a while and it goes along with a problem that Batty will have in the transition to Act III. He wants to do these big dramatic stories with heavy themes but doesn’t want to do the follow up. How Susan readjusts to life is an obvious story to explore, how Sadie being there for her is an obvious story to explore, but these aren’t things that Batty is interested in doing. He wants to do emotional stories without focusing on the emotional fallout from them. It’ll happen with the death of Lisa, it’ll happen when Bull drives over a cliff and it happens here, too, in the wake of Susan’s suicide attempt.

So following the big story with Susan, we get Sadie there for a big emotional moment when she returns… and we get nothing else. We get some pointless nonsense where Batty continues trying to make Sadie into Cindy Lite. She does get a multi-week story in May regarding the prom where oh no, she doesn’t have a date!

It’s also at this point where Sadie gets a redesign as she decides that the prom is a good time to get a haircut that she frets over but ultimately can’t back out of.

*Congratulations on finally entering 1993!*

As said she’d been fretting over not having a date and as Becky was still mostly a prop for her mother, she’d yet to be designated as Wally’s One True Love so that earlier appearance might have been set up for her having to settle to taking him. But no, Sadie just finds some random guy who breaks up with his girlfriend to take her.

*He’s shivering because this story has no heat.*

In the fall, she makes a glorified cameo during a story where Batty, via Wally, tells us that tobacco is wacko.

This is the point where it’s clear that Batty’s interest in Sadie has really waned as it’s not until January 1998, nearly a year and a half later, that Sadie next appears, this time in what’s nothing more than a random one-off strip.

She next shows up for a two week story in March. Les’ class is going on a trip to Washington D.C. and needs to have the number 1 focus of Batty’s high school strips (school levies are number 2): a fund raiser. But poor Susan, finally getting some attention again for the first time in over two years, is having trouble selling anything. Sadie picks up on this and decides she’s going to help out Susan.

(By the by, the D.C. trip is the origin of one of my favorite Batiukisms: vendos!)

*That would put Susan above most of the cast of this comic.*

Naturally, this involves that apparent favorite of teenage girl activities, the makeover. Which means that Sadie, Tiffany and Courtney-Who-Is-Now-Brittany drag Susan out to the mall.

And by the time they’re finished, Susan is practically unrecognizable.

*Considering Batty likes having his guys call their girlfriends and wives “kiddo”…*

So Sadie’s given Susan a makeover, doing something to help her feel more confident, she’s also paying for it all herself. And it’s not presented as having any ulterior motive, like it’ll reflect well on Sadie. She seems to be doing it entirely for Susan’s benefit and Susan doesn’t reject it. She likes her new look and keeps it. And it even benefits her… kind of.

This whole thing will lead to another attempted prestige arc as Batty decides to tell a story about domestic violence as Matt Miller turns out to be a less than ideal boyfriend and we have yet another instance of Frustrating TB Writing. Because Sadie and Susan are friends, because Sadie has done a lot for Susan and because Sadie’s makeover is the genesis of this story one would assume she’d have a big role to play in this storyline. Her friend is dating the big man on campus, he’s being controlling and physically abusive. She should have a lot to say and a lot to do. But no, she has nothing to do with anything. All she can get is a background cameo during graduation.

*Even worse, she has to talk with Linda.*

That’s it, that’s all she gets in a story where her friend is a victim of domestic violence! But of course, this story isn’t actually about Susan because this morphs into a story about Les and Lisa where we get the first (I believe) of the endless retellings — either in full or truncated — of the Lisa’s pregnancy story as well as the first retcon where Frankie (named for the first time) is revealed to have physically abused Lisa and forced himself on her.

Because that’s what this story needed. Not Sadie acting as someone her friend could confide in or maybe using her position as the most popular girl in school to stand up to Matt. Nope, it needed the Moores hijacking it and adding rape to the comic’s lore.

But let’s move on from that unpleasantness to something more, temporarily, happy as soon after graduation it’s the wedding of Funky and Cindy and given that her sister is getting married, Sadie will surely play a role right? At this point, I assume our collective naivete has been thoroughly washed away as she gets another glorified cameo.

*And the last of the Big Eighties Hair holdouts falls.*

At this point, Sadie is reduced to bit character status as it’s not until May 2000 when she next shows up with Cindy getting her a job at Westview’s Home for Wayward Young Women during breaks from college.

*I told you, Sadie, there is no escaping it.*

As is to be expected, this goes absolutely nowhere and Sadie won’t show up again until early 2002 when she talks with Wally before he takes the ROFLcopter to Laughganistan.

A few things, first that first panel in the first strip (firstfirstfirst) is wildly out of character and another example of Batty writing the character he thinks Sadie is versus the character that she actually is. The second is that this is a pretty radical change in direction for Sadie who’s gone from (as Batty sees her anyway) vapid popular girl concerned only with her own image to a conscientious peacenik.

Sadie will actually get the most attention she’s gotten in years in 2002 as she shortly afterwards hears the news of what happened to Wally and is obviously deeply affected by it.

And then shows up for Monroe’s brief return when he reads a letter that Wally had written shortly before his ROFLcopter was shot down by a LOLcket.

But looks are deceiving and like usual this is yet another false start as it’s close to a full year later, during the John Byrne illustrated story of Wally’s return in 2003, that she next shows up snarking about Becky’s taste in animal-haired men.

Now this is definitely the judgiest we’ve seen her in a long time but given that eternal Montoni’s waitress and Wally’s future Mrs. Fix-It Mommywife is joining in I guess we’re not intended to find it too bad. Or maybe we are as Rachel’s only real character at this point was “hot tease”, I don’t know.

It’s yet another year before she shows up again, this time in 2004 for a week of her reflecting on being a student in Les’ class.

*I guess this is supposed to be some sort of joke?*

She gets another appearance that year talking to Rachel about Becky finally escaping Pizzacatraz to take up the job as the WHS assistant band director.

By this point she’s been reduced to what are pretty much cameos as in 2005 she gets some wordless appearances during a week dedicated to Tony trying to teach his employees, including new waitress and Crankshaft guest character Mindy Murdoch, proper etiquette.

*“Especially that cartoonist guy. His stories never go anywhere.”*

And also makes a background appearance during the double wedding for Funky/Holly and Wally/Becky.

*I really have to give TB credit for somehow fitting two lame jakes into a single strip. Bravo, Tom!*

Sadie gets her first speaking role in well over two years in a November 2006 strip as she and Mindy complain about Rachel getting all the tips.

*Speaking of racial profiling, remember the Montoni’s red lining story? Remember how that went absolutely nowhere?*

The next week, Sadie appears as background wallpaper during Becky’s baby shower.

That 11/25/2006 strip will turn out to be Sadie’s last appearance. 2007 is basically all Lisa, all the time between her cancer and Darin searching for his bio-mom so Batty has no time for anyone else, especially not for characters he doesn’t like. She did get an Act III character design sheet however.

But if Batty ever had any intention of using her then he quickly discarded those ideas to cast her into the, as he called it, “Dumb Character Phantom Zone” and she was neither seen nor even so much as mentioned again. What happened to her in the intervening decade between Acts II and III? Who knows? Maybe she got out of Westview, got a decent job somewhere working in, I don’t know, marketing or HR or something. That seems like the kind of thing she’d do.

So that’s it, with Sadie’s final appearance we’ve come to the end of this examination and history lesson. But what was the point? As I said at the start of all of this, Sadie definitely is a failure on Batty’s part but it’s not for the reasons he considers. Rather, it’s because Tom Batiuk failed to ever properly realize her actual potential.

TB complained that Sadie was a clone, a doppelganger and a “pale imitation of her big sis” but she was that only because that’s what he wanted her to be. He wanted her to be Cindy Jr. because he enjoyed writing Cindy in Act I but the problem is that Cindy only worked the way that she did because she was a cartoonish character in a cartoonish setting. Act II clung onto a bit of the cartoony wackiness for two or three years but the very nature of what Batty wanted to do meant that the more absurd tone just wouldn’t work in the more serious and dramatic setting he was trying to create. This means that the bits of Cindy he wanted to carry over with Sadie were completely inconguous with what the comic had become as they were made for what was effectively a different comic entirely.

And when he realized it wasn’t going to work, what did he do? He gave up and declared her to be stupid and ill-conceived. Instead of taking that mistake and working with it he simply threw up his hands as if there was nothing that he could do. This is in spite of the fact that, as I’ve hopefully shown, there were myriad directions to take her character that worked into that whole pale imitation of Cindy things. Plenty of stories that could have been done, ways to evolve and explore her character. The worst part is that it seems as if on some level Batty actually knew this. There are countless examples shown of Sadie having more below the surface, or of interesting directions she could have gone only to just never amount to anything. Her friendship with Susan is the most glaring one, but why give her that connection with Wally before he ships out only to do nothing with it once he returns?

And none of it is helped by Batty’s inability and lack of desire, which became worse as he got older, to write about characters he can’t relate to. Sadie was a woman and she wasn’t into comic books or pulp serials or writing or chasing awards and accolades so how could he relate to her? And if he couldn’t relate to her, how could he write her?

At least by the standards of Funky Winkerbean, Sadie Summers is a good character. But all the same she is a failure, not through any fault of her own but because the person writing her was too shortsighted to consider anything beyond his own view of what she should have been. He wanted Cindy II but the circumstances of the strip meant she could never be Cindy II. A better writer would have taken that as an opportunity to really think about this character and dive in. But we are not talking about a better writer, we are talking about Tom Batiuk and instead he would continue trying to force Sadie into a role she was thoroughly unsuited for. And for the crime of being unable to be what he wanted she was unceremoniously tossed aside.

She thus stands as a testament to many of Batty’s worst traits. His inability to think outside of his own poorly constructed box, how easily he gives up when presented with something that frustrates him, a lack of vision that causes him to miss an easy or natural story and being unable or unwilling to follow up dramatic moments in a satisfying way (or at all) are all present and in full force with Sadie. That, I feel, is Sadie’s true legacy and as such she will forever exist as one of the most damning indictments of his shortcomings as a writer.